


up in our bedroom, after the war

by rufeepeach



Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, M/M, Post-Canon, The South Downs, and stare at the sea for a few decades, ineffable husbands, is to move into a cottage with the love of your life, sometimes the best thing for trauma
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-01
Updated: 2019-07-01
Packaged: 2020-06-02 10:36:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,118
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19439722
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rufeepeach/pseuds/rufeepeach
Summary: Aziraphale looks at Crowley, the beloved furrow of his brow, the way his lips – made for smiling, for laughter, for that indulgent smile when he does something miraculous just to bring Aziraphale joy – twist downward, at the tension in his slender limbs. Most arresting: the saltwater in his yellow eyes, the mist, the ache. They have been here six thousand times, almost: at the eclipse of their orbit, when they are so close they can almost touch, before they move apart again, before one begins to crest and the other to fall away.Aziraphale takes a deep breath, and releases it slowly through his nose. No more gravity; no more orbit. In the free fall, the same old laws of motion no longer apply.“Then come with me,” he says.





	up in our bedroom, after the war

**Author's Note:**

> somehow the world didn't end and they went out for lunch and were inside each other (kind of) and i'm still not certain??? that they??? can communicate???? and also the whole world just got turned upside down maybe they need to breathe idk
> 
> Title and theming stolen from the Stars song of the same name.
> 
> _Listen, the birds sing_   
>  _Listen, the bells ring_   
>  _All the living are dead, and the dead are all living_   
>  _The war is over, and we are beginning_

There’s a certain calm stillness that settles in the aftermath of a detonation.

The ears ring, the body unable to readjust quite so quickly to the deafening absence of sound. Muscles tense, awaiting a second explosion. Perhaps it comes, and the limbs and throat react, a necessary shout, a burst of energy to flee or to brace, fight or flight, whichever is most necessary and natural for survival (sometimes, not often, never in fact except for one specific and unnatural case, the muscles belong to someone else, two selves self-preserving one another, as if this too were a requirement to withstand the blast).

And then, slowly, the ringing ceases, and it begins to become apparent that the destruction has ceased. Dust – fragments of blasted world, like charred scraps of paper and falling debris, like bodies dislodged from their previous, eternal positions – floats vaguely downward through still air, to find new, permanent settling places.

The world continues to spin. The sun sets and rises again over the blast zone. Immediate aftermath becomes day one, becomes damage control, clean up, search and rescue.

But still, the world has shifted. Things that were once are no more, and new craters and empty-spaces take their place. Stillness, emptiness, is not the world’s natural state, and yet it is right and proper, it is what comes _after_ , when an _after_ comes into being.

The ringing in the ears is reflected in the stillness of the crater and the mess of debris. It is much more unsettling, as one of two cognizant survivors discovers as he enters his bookshop for the first time truly as himself, when the _after_ feels so exactly like the _before_. Cognitive dissonance. As Aziraphale runs his hands over his books, he discovers that, truly, there are no smudges, no traces of ash or soot, not a single book burnt. Outside, the same people walk by as he has seen every day at this time – commuters bustling to work with their minds already in the office, students meandering through the Soho streets seeking interest and difference, and every other manner of human being getting on with their human lives.

Only a handful – himself, Crowley, the former-antichrist and his little band, the witch and the witchfinder (both sets, young and old), and perhaps one confused and newly-living deliveryman – know how close this little world came to ending in flames. A near-miss can so readily feel like a crash, when the adrenaline kicks in.

As the euphoria of survival begins to bleed into the humdrum everyday, Aziraphale finds that his ears are still ringing with a blast almost no one else even heard.

 _It will pass_ , he scolds himself as, for the third time in a single day, he uses a microwave and not his miraculous power to reheat the same cold cup of cocoa, _this is everything you wanted: the world returned to its rightful spin. There is no excuse for dissatisfaction in the face of total victory!_

He cannot even say for certain that the discomfort in his stomach truly can be called ‘dissatisfaction’. When he prods it, queries it, asks the knot he carries in his chest what can be done to loosen it, the answer is a resounding silence. No, he does not regret that the world continued. Yes, the perfect-vintage champagne at the Ritz, his favourite cocoa, his overstuffed armchair and the smell of his books are all as vital and as comfortable and as beautiful now as they were the day before Armageddon, and the year before that.

Crowley has become a permanent fixture, a constant companion. How can Aziraphale _possibly_ be dissatisfied when Crowley is here, sauntering along beside him through parks, in and out of coffee shops, sprawled beside him at dinner, sharing his wine collection? It is greed itself, ungrateful, miserable, to be unable to clear the ringing in his ears even in the face of such gifts.

But the feeling persists, the sense of not-rightness, like the knowledge of a bulb half-flickering in the corner of the eye, the taste of sparkling wine left to go flat, the ache in legs gone stiff from sitting in one position for too long.

“You’re fidgeting, angel.” Aziraphale jumps. Crowley’s voice is mild, he isn’t even looking at Aziraphale, and yet Aziraphale feels suddenly exposed by the comment.

Two weeks after the end and the beginning. They’re sitting in St James’ – the same park bench, sitting in the same place as always, the same ducks making the same racket, the same people in their same overcoats walking by, as have done for the past two hundred years since they first started meeting here – and Aziraphale is twitchy. His hands won’t sit still, his fingers twiddling, his knee jostling up and down. Crowley is, by contrast, preternaturally still, sprawled in his usual louche attitude, but just as Aziraphale cannot stop twitching, Crowley is entirely too tense.

They are together, for whatever the fact of physical proximity is worth. Just as before, everything is better, brighter, easier, when they are together. The constant company, daily meetings and hours spent together, is a marked improvement on before, of that Aziraphale at last holds no doubt.

And yet… and _yet_.

He swallows, and looks at his fidgeting hands. He cannot think of a word to say.

They talked so much, before. They _knew_ what to say. They’d fill hours with outrageous and probably untrue tales of temptations and sins, countered always by speeches on the topic of goodness and virtue only half-meant. They’d be introduced over and over by mutual friends, they would meet at the same weddings, the same funerals, share complaints about colleagues Above and Below and recommendations for Earthly delights not yet sampled. They would laugh. Aziraphale misses that.

Aziraphale had hoped, in the after, that these pleasures could be maintained with the accompanying pressures removed. To an angel time is an elastic thing, a second can be both a blink and an eternity, and he has noticed and catalogued every extended millisecond of silence that has grown between them, their meetings slipping from bubbling conversation, to low commentary, to companionable silence, to this, to him, sitting on his favourite park bench with his favourite entity ever created by the Almighty, and unable to think of a thing to say.

“Do you ever…” he begins, stops, swallows, shakes his head. His fingers tremble around one another, unable to rest, falling into a holding pattern of uncomfortable and yet unbridgeable distance.

“What, angel?” The exhaustion in Crowley’s voice resonates in the bones in Aziraphale’s new-yet-ancient ribcage. He risks a glance down to Crowley’s face. A mistake: he is met with the gleam of sunglass and the knowledge of snake-eyes blinking back behind them. Worse: the slight furrow in Crowley’s brow, the soft quirk of his lips (Aziraphale once wrote a sonnet to that gentle twist of a mouth, although he would never name names), indescribable fondness sharpened by concern.

What was he going to say? He has forgotten now, so it was hardly important. Indeed, what is importance now, in the absence of urgency, the deafening silence from Above and Below, in this _lack_ of work and of purpose? (Their own side? Whatever does that mean, anyway?)

“Oh, this is thoroughly absurd,” Aziraphale mutters, shaking his hands apart, a sharp motion that releases none of the discordance in his limbs.

 _Preservation of energy_ , he thinks to himself _: the force of the blast must go somewhere after it is released_.

He rises to his feet. Crowley unfolds himself, serpentine still after all these millennia in his pale human skin, and rises slower, uncertain. “What is the matter, angel?” he asks, pressing a little harder this time _. Too fast_ , Aziraphale panics, _too fast!_

“Nothing, nothing, dear boy,” he lies, he’s always been a good liar, dishonesty should be ash on the lips of an angel but he has never found this to be the case. They roll from him like honey, sweet and clear, and rarely has he found himself questioned. “Just need to get back to the bookshop! Much to do.”

Crowley’s eyes narrow – how is it possible, even behind his sunglasses, that Aziraphale can know exactly what those snake-eyes are doing at all times?

He’s asked just this before – and not asked, and everything in-between – and Aziraphale is tired, so tired, of smiling and lying, and saying ‘nothing, dear boy’. But this has ever been their issue: Crowley will identify a problem centuries before Aziraphale is capable of contemplating a solution.

Guilt is an ugly thing; it seeps into the bones and clings, choking like tar. They’re survivors, and yet so is everyone else. Aziraphale cannot soothe the line across Crowley’s brow. He cannot offer a solution: he never could. He’s only just beginning to understand the magnitude of the question Crowley poses, and now the world has shifted and changed and yet not-changed, and there ought to be soot on books that smell of brand new ink. Something ought to be different, they ought to be different, and oh if only Aziraphale could identify _what_.

_‘How long have we been friends? Six thousand years!’_

For six millennia they orbited around one another, drawing close then apart, kept in their set pattern by forces well outside of their control. There had been a comfortable predictability, safety, in that ordered stasis. Continuity, eternity, with Crowley’s proximity only disruptive enough to keep things interesting. Aziraphale understood that: someday it would end, and so it was worth preserving while they had it.

Then the war ended before it even began, and yet his ears keep ringing.

In the absence of the planned gravitational pattern, bodies careen through space in perpetuity, directionless, static but for relative mass. The comfort of orbit has lost its meaning, its necessity, and yet it _is_ necessary, in one form or another.

The force of Crowley’s gaze draws him in.

It attempts to pin him in place. Aziraphale forces himself to smile, to turn, to walk back toward Soho, and to safety (he isn’t the snake of the pair of them, and yet he feels himself slither away).

\---

Aziraphale expects, with regret, with sadness, with a longing almost comforting in its familiarity, for Crowley to eventually respond to the ringing in their ears with a resumption of distance. Aziraphale presumes, gloomily, that the chasm between them must have closed only briefly, cliffs meeting to almost, almost form a mountain, but now the sea is rushing in, the tide always following the moon, and where once it had seemed they were sharing the same breath he can barely glance with his fingertips.

And yet, that evening after their silence in the park, and then the next, and the next, Crowley shows up in the back of the shop, sprawls on the sofa that has very much become his own, and stays even through the silence. He passes the time fiddling with some small device – “it’s an iPhone, angel, and I got a commendation for this one – the battery” – or places enormous headphones over the flames of his hair, or otherwise simply stares at the ceiling, without any complaint. There’s a consistency to him, a persistence (tides and moons indeed, absurd!) that Aziraphale has always valued and disavowed in equal measure.

Aziraphale takes to sitting in his armchair, a book on his lap, and pretending to read. In truth, rarely can he focus on the pages, even his old favourites failing to spark the imagination now. _It’s not you, dear friends,_ Aziraphale wants to murmur to their beloved leather spines, _the fault undoubtedly lies with me._

He glances up to Crowley as this thought glimmers through his mind. Crowley is collapsed on his back, a bottle of good whiskey balanced on the plane of his abdomen, his neck relaxed back over the arm. He is the picture of relaxation and yet he is too, too still, slender limbs arranged in artful chaos, a simulacrum of comfort.

Aziraphale’s hands fiddle with the pages. When Crowley first began this nightly tradition – now a week ago, maybe two, oh he counts the seconds and yet they still slide by the devils – Aziraphale had hoped the change of setting, of routine, may prompt a change of mind. But the silence, heavier by the day, the stillness after a detonation, fallout, that sense of the end having happened and yet there is nothing to rebuild, no work in aftermath to keep the survivors’ hands and minds at work, rests thicker by the day. Ash, falling like snow, its heaviness caving in the roofs of houses, clogging in the lungs of the occupants.

“Why…” Aziraphale stops, then swallows, and again he cannot speak.

“Oh, finish a sentence, won’t you angel?” Crowley drawls. He sounds irritated, and it would hurt Aziraphale, and yet instead it is almost comforting. They are both exhausted, sleepless beings though they may be. They are both irritated. He is not alone, unhappy in paradise.

 _Time to leave the garden_ , indeed. Hadn’t Adam and Eve also found it so? In the wake of knowing the truth of things, the veil of ignorance becoming irreparably tattered torn, the world simply cannot continue as once it was. Perhaps the obligation of joy is torture enough.

“Why do you keep coming here?” Aziraphale forces out, and oh, it comes wrong, he can feel it, the change in the air. Crowley cannot stiffen and tense – he is tension itself already – but he sighs, and shifts, and it is much the same.

“I can leave, if you’d prefer,” he says. He sounds so sad, and sadness can almost be abided, but it is the resignation, the hopelessness in his voice, that catches in Aziraphale’s throat.

“That’s not what I meant,” Aziraphale replies, gently, gently, and oh goodness, even this is worse than before, when they might have scolded and shouted instead of this weary sighing. He is taken by the urge to surge out of his chair and cross the room, to shake Crowley with all this useless residual energy, to snap him out of his stupor as if Aziraphale has any notion where to start with his own.

“Then what did you mean?”

“I meant…” oh, good question, as ever, as always. Crowley is nothing but questions, his whole being a paradox, and Aziraphale could never hope to keep pace with the answering. “I meant why here? Why not… St James’s or the café?” ‘ _Why not your place?’_ comes unbidden to Aziraphale’s tongue, and he chokes it down. It is presumptuous, and implies he is requesting an invitation he is not certain he wants.

Crowley’s apartment had felt right, that night between detonations, like a fallout bunker, a shelter from the storm. But that, again, belongs to the _before_ , and Aziraphale wonders if being there again would do anything for the itch beneath his skin.

“We can go there if you’d like,” Crowley says. “Anywhere you wanna go.”

A lump forms in Aziraphale’s throat: an echo, a memory best left forgotten. Wherever he wants to go, at whatever pace, and Crowley’s perfection can be _maddening_ sometimes (their fingers had brushed on the thermos, a sweet burn that had nothing to do with holy water, and Aziraphale’s skin remembers even as the rest of him tries to forget).

“Quite.” He fiddles, fidgets, uselessly. Crowley continues to gaze at the ceiling. He knows the dance now: silence will reign until one or both of them finds cause to move, and he will rise and return to find Crowley sleeping or pretending to, at least, on the sofa, and Crowley will have vanished before daybreak.

“It burned down,” Crowley says, suddenly, his voice still carefully neutral, as if musing on an obscure point of architecture and not the end of the world. “I came here and found it in flames, and you… nowhere. They had come to take me away, probably to kill me, but I’d survived because of course I had. Then I came here and… well, hellfire and earthly fire are all the same in the dark.”

Aziraphale’s mouth opens, and then closes. _I lost my best friend_.

He’d known this, it was the only explanation that made sense of Crowley’s poor, ravaged, beautiful face broken by grief, and the book in his hands, and the news of the shop burned to the ground. But they didn’t talk about it, because they never talk about it, they never did _before_ and they haven’t learned to now, _after_ , either. The ringing in their ears drowns out any attempt.

“There’s not a smudge now,” Aziraphale reminds him, echoing his own words back as if they mean anything at all, “Not a book burnt.”

“I know,” Crowley sighs. “It’s wonderful, isn’t it? A proper miracle.”

“Yes,” Aziraphale agrees, but his heart isn’t in it, the Eastern Gate closing, and him on the walls, watching, helpless, more fire, more loss, _time to leave the garden_.

“Sort of wish it hadn’t though, y’know?” Crowley murmurs, and then, then, just for a second, a sliver of sunlight through a stone moved loose, worked out by a serpentine demon with a penchant for troublesome questions like _‘what’s so bad about knowing good from evil?’_ and ‘ _what is the nature of God’s ineffable plan?’_ and ‘ _do you think I can slither through this gap?’_

“W-what do you mean?” Aziraphale stammers in response, aching on the response. Crowley is always five steps ahead of him, so maybe he has done the impossible, and assembled all these scattered thoughts and worries and inconsistencies into some kind of order, a galaxy from disparate stars. What a miraculous creature he is. Aziraphale cannot imagine any universe complete without a Crowley to make it so.

A huff of breath leaves Crowley’s throat. “Just… it all seems so neat and tidy now, doesn’t it? We’re free, and the world’s safe, and Above and Below have gone away and left us to it, and it’s just… now what? At least if you had a bookshop to rebuild, we’d have something to _do_.”

Aziraphale swallows, wetting his throat. “I… I suppose I assumed we’d go back to a normal routine,” he says, his lips quirking in a smile he doesn’t mean, trying to convince himself of nonchalance he doesn’t feel. “The flat, the car, the shop… everything back as it was.”

“Right,” Crowley nods. “Right, and it is, I mean it is, it’s all fine and good and home in time for tea. Adam wanted it that way, and he’s happy.”

“Adam’s a child,” Aziraphale murmurs. “He has a whole human life ahead of him, and limited time to live it. In time he’ll want for more, and the world will doubtlessly supply.”

“Oh, of course,” Crowley agrees. He takes a breath, then releases it slowly. “I suppose… this is fine.”

Except it isn’t. And they both well know it. And for once, there is Crowley, always three steps ahead, here saying the _wrong_ thing, needing the _right_ thing said, when always before they have been paradoxically the other way around. _What If I did the good thing and you the bad one?_ Crowley leads at his quickstep stride and pulls Aziraphale along behind him, maybe sometimes keeping pace, too often falling behind, dropping their hands between them often, too often. Now, Crowley is still (it is too calm, too quiet, in the aftermath of the blast).

Crowley’s head rolls to one side, and miraculously, beautifully, he removes his sunglasses. The look in his golden eyes catches Aziraphale’s breath: he looks exhausted, haunted, _vulnerable_.

 _Anywhere you wanna go_.

Six thousand years is such a terribly long time, and yet sometimes it feels like it passed in the blink of an eye. Such is the nature of purpose and perpetuity of motion, and of the certainty of an end point. The End was such a certainty (until it wasn’t, until theory became praxis and the risk of losing everything, the everything that is now staring at the ceiling in perfect stillness, overrode all else) that time, however long, seemed limited.

Hedonism takes a different hue when life’s pleasures could well be infinite.

_Time to leave the garden._

“The beach,” Aziraphale says, suddenly. Crowley looks at him, brows furrowed, perplexed. “You said anywhere, well, I’d like a beach.”

“Never thought you were one for the Costas, angel,” Crowley murmurs, but his lips are twitching into an approximation of a smile, and it is a beautiful thing to behold, much missed. “Pining for an all-inclusive in Benidorm? You have gone native.”

Aziraphale gives an ungainly snort. “Nothing so garish, I assure you. I was thinking of the South Downs, perhaps. Somewhere blustery, with cliffs and hills, and some interesting rock pools.”

Crowley’s nose wrinkles. “Doesn’t sound like my scene,” he says.

“You can drop me off, then,” Aziraphale says, primly. “Waterloo should have trains going south. Run me to the train station?”

“Oh come off it, angel, Southern Rail actually was one of mine and I’m not damning you to that.”

Aziraphale looks at him, the beloved furrow of his brow, the way his lips – made for smiling, for laughter, for that indulgent smile when he does something miraculous just to bring Aziraphale joy – twist downward, at the tension in his slender limbs. Most arresting: the saltwater in his yellow eyes, the mist, the ache. They have been here six thousand times, almost: at the eclipse of their orbit, when they are so close they can almost touch, before they move apart again, before one begins to crest and the other to fall away.

Aziraphale takes a deep breath, and releases it slowly through his nose. No more gravity; no more orbit. In the free fall, the same old laws of motion no longer apply.

“Then come with me,” he says. It is not the breaking of the cycle – that, in fact, was Crowley’s honour, late one night in an obscure village in Oxfordshire, awaiting a bus to London. Aziraphale had accepted, but had done so without words, and in doing so left room for comfortable doubt, for plausible deniability, for the resumption of their old ways once the dust settled.

“Angel-“

“We’ll find a cottage somewhere,” Aziraphale continues, a rush, a torrent, the sea rushing in, tides and moons again. “Somewhere near a nice village with a good bakery, and a few restaurants, somewhere with _taste_. We can bring whatever alcohol we have handy, drink ourselves stupid every night if we wish, and, and, and…”

“And?” Crowley blinks at him, and for just a moment Aziraphale is fooled, he falls once again for the affected irony, the detachment Crowley feigns when truly, he was created to be attached to anything and everything, clingy thing that he is.

“And just… just _be_ ,” Aziraphale finishes, a little lamely. He swallows, this is so _difficult_ , and Crowley is so much better at this, this vulnerability-thing, bearing one’s soul, the essential irony of him being that light shining in the core of him, burnished rather than dimmed by his Fall. “Be _together_ , I mean. I know it’s not Alpha Centurai, but-“

“Yes,” Crowley says, cutting him off.

“Yes?”

“Yes.”

\---

And so, they find a cottage.

The world lightens almost as soon as they have left London. They will return – the bookshop is home, has been for some time, although Aziraphale thinks that upon his return a little refurbishment, perhaps even a renovation, may be in order – but that may not be for some time. As the air clears, smog turning to bright, clear skies, Aziraphale finds his bones lighten, as if he could fly even without his unearthly wings.

They drive in silence, a rarity. Aziraphale was braced for hours of that raucous modern music that Crowley so enjoys, and yet neither reaches for the radio.

“Y’know, I think we duelled here,” Crowley says, his first words since they left the M25, as they turn off the motorway, and the fields give way to forest.

“No, dear,” Aziraphale shakes his head. “That was several miles further west of here. Kingdom of Wessex, if you recall.”

“Mmm-hmm,” Crowley nods. “Yeah, okay, but a tree’s a tree, it _might_ have been here.”

“This was wild country then,” Aziraphale reminds him. “Banditry abounded. No room for knightly duels. Although that duel was _highly_ unnecessary even in proper surroundings.”

“You loved it,” Crowley scoffs, a smile blooming on his face that sets Aziraphale’s heart ablaze. Crowley’s smiles never really went away, but this, this freedom, this reminiscence… it’s like basking in the sun after several weeks of nuclear winter. “And I wouldn’t have actually run you through.”

“I wouldn’t have allowed you the chance!” Aziraphale cries, feigning offence. “I believe I came off the victor of that bout.”

“Only because we agreed you’d win,” Crowley retorts. “If I’d been on my a-game, angel, you would have been on the floor in minutes.”

“As I recall, you insisted we duel in order to convince a certain maiden that you were not a suitable prospect,” Aziraphale reminds him. “To think, that whole sorry mess with Mordred could have been avoided, had I only nobly refused your challenge!”

Crowley snorts, and shakes his head. The Bentley veers right, sharply, throwing Aziraphale for the umpteenth time against the side of the vehicle. “Careful!” he cries. Crowley’s smirk widens. Aziraphale gasps, offended, “You did that on purpose!”

“Morgana was gonna do what Morgana was gonna do regardless of me, and anyway, I’d told her she wasn’t my type.”

Crowley glances across, askance. Aziraphale feels a charming blush rise in his cheeks. He has missed this, this subtextual dance, so much warmer and sweeter now it can be encouraged openly, without fear of reprisals from elsewhere. Without fear of rejection, either, or of being toyed with and cast aside. Whatever he and Crowley are, they are eternal, forever.

Aziraphale rolls his eyes, playfully. “That ought to have been abundantly clear,” he mutters, fondly. Crowley throws his head back with an exuberant bark of laughter, and almost collides with a beautiful, ancient oak tree in the process.

“Watch the road!”

\---

Miraculously, they reach the cottage in one piece.

The little home is beautiful, a wonder if whitewashed stone and hard flooring, a miracle such a place was available at such short notice, although it is almost November and there is a nip in the air. Perhaps they were simply fortunate: Aziraphale chooses to believe so, anyway.

There is only one bedroom, and perhaps they had used their sleepless natures to justify not seeking a larger abode, but when Crowley gently places his leather hold-all next to Aziraphale’s tartan suitcase, neither comments or questions it. The bed is enormous, it can more comfortably accommodate two than one, and Aziraphale promises himself then that when they return to London, whenever that is, he will renovate the upstairs of the shop to include a large bed, and purposely place Crowley’s things beside it, so that it will be effort to leave.

The view of the rolling hills from the broad window was made to be shared. Aziraphale allows himself just a moment’s wishful thinking, that perhaps this view was created for sharing, that he was intended to stand here now, two months into after, with Crowley standing beside him.

It is marvellously peaceful, and he is reminded of a phrase from a book only half-read, filched from Warlock’s room a lifetime ago, in a brief moment of weakness, seeking to share in Crowley’s raising of the child: ‘ _the world is quiet here’._

Aziraphale could stand like this for the rest of the day, just watching the world go by. The window is slightly open, the sound of birdsong from the tree in the garden filtering through. For the first time since the very first time, the world does feel fresh, does feel new. The lush green hills roll out, dotted with large splashes of dark forest, and the if one squints, the glimmer of the ocean peeks, just visible on the skyline, that telling _absence_ too-close to be the horizon where the land gives way to the sea

A late afternoon stroll through the village reveals a lovely little bakery _(“they’ve won prizes for their croissants, you know!” “I know, angel, you told me in the car”)_ , several streets of adorable independent shops (“ _You’ve got literal magic you don’t need to buy your clothes, angel” “Yes, but it’s more fun to try things on and to browse, you of all people should understand that”_ ) and even an old music store, tucked away in an alley near the beach (“ _Won’t anything you purchase become that same record the second it enters that car of yours?” “I have a good two weeks’ grace before that happens and they have some very obscure-“ “Bebop?” “Yes, angel, that’s exactly what everyone calls rare deep-cut Patti Smith b-sides. Bebop.”_ )

By the time they reach the edge of the village, the sea breeze growing stronger with every step, Aziraphale is certain of three things:

  1. that there will be croissants from the bakery in the morning, and Crowley will act as if he had nothing to do with it;
  2. that Crowley will wear that lovely long-suffering expression, the indulgent half-smile that means he’s enjoying being put-upon, while following from one store to the next; and
  3. that there is a ‘deep-cut Patti Smith b-side’ already sitting by Crowley’s side of the bed, despite Crowley having regretfully put it back after much musing.



For a demon, he does have remarkable self-control. Aziraphale, however, faced with the opportunity to indulge Crowley for a change, does not.

It is the cliffs, however, and the sea, that are the true wonders of their little corner of the world. Before they retire to the dining room of a local hotel for dinner and drinks, Aziraphale insists upon a stroll along the cliffs, and Crowley smiles, that same indulgent half-smile, and follows.

They walk side by side, the wind buffeting, cold and brackish and bracing, cutting through layers, making Aziraphale wish for an anorak. Their hands hang between them; one gust makes him stumble, his fingers brushing Crowley’s, and suddenly that is all it took, one miraculous and yet natural, coincidental gust of wind, to have them holding hands, walking hand-in-hand, as if it is the most natural thing in the world. Crowley’s fingers are sure and strong in his, long fingers wrapped around his own, as if they were perfectly sculpted to fit there.

It is a minor collision, hardly an interplanetary impact, two celestial bodies collide with one another and it is a breath of wind, and fingers tangling, and warmth suffusing, smiles breaking, nothing like stars at all, really, save for the glow.

“This town has a very famous church, you know,” Aziraphale tells him, as they walk hand-in-hand, a leaflet from the local tourist office clutched in his free one. “It’s ancient, one of the first built by the Normans.”

“Is that ancient?” Crowley cocks his head to one side. “Really?”

“Well,” Aziraphale tries and fails to smother a grin. “It is to most people, anyway, and I wasn’t around for the Norman Conquest, you know. I was otherwise engaged further north.”

“The arrow in the eye wasn’t me, if that’s what you’re asking,” Crowley says. “I was busy too. Italy was more my speed back then.”

“Mm,” Aziraphale murmurs. “All those corrupt popes.”

“Also not my fault,” Crowley rolls his eyes. “Although I did get an _excellent_ bonus thanks to those Borgias.”

“Well, in any event,” Aziraphale continues, not avoiding but revelling, basking in the glow in his chest, how deeply and truly, how wonderfully he loves the figure beside him. “I would like to see it.”

“I’m not coming inside if you insist on visiting Her house,” Crowley warns, although his tone is mild, belying a smile. “I’ve burned my feet enough for one eternal life on your behalf.”

“Did I ever properly thank you for that?” Aziraphale asks, his eyes still on the horizon.

“I took the holy water as gratitude,” Crowley sniffs. “Turned out much more useful in the end. Those prophecy books didn’t even have Agnes Nutter!”

“Oh, that wasn’t a thank you,” Aziraphale shakes his head. He pulls them to a stop, and Crowley follows. Aziraphale tugs just gently on their joined hands. They are on the cliffs, facing the sea, the sunset burnishing Crowley’s flaming hair in rich golds and coppers.

“Wasn’t it?” Crowley cocks his head to one side, teasing, gentle, Aziraphale cannot breathe for the supernova in his chest. So beautiful is that gentle smile that Aziraphale hardly notices: in the rush of the sea breeze, the ringing in his ears has stopped.

“Nope,” Aziraphale pops the ‘p’, playful, quite uncharacteristic. He stuffs the leaflet in his pocket, and gently tugs Crowley’s glasses off his face, folding them with care in his jacket pocket, indulging in the feel of Crowley’s thundering heart under his coat. “So, thank you.”

“You’re very welcome, angel,” Crowley murmurs.

The golden light turns to silver. A glance at the horizon shows storm clouds gathering, the English autumn turning to winter, heavy grey covering the sun.

“Thank you,” Aziraphale says again, shaking his head, and there they are again, standing on the edge of the world, watching a storm roll in, close enough to touch, except this time instead of a wing over Crowley’s head it is a hand clasped in his, and instead of distance, orbit, eclipse and collapse, it is this, simply this, them, _together_.

Another gust of wind, perhaps, or maybe an interstellar collision, impact, energy built and released and Aziraphale’s mouth meets Crowley’s, only softly, gently, shared grip used as leverage to crane up and press fully, swallowing a soft sound of surrender, the first sigh at the start of the world. A hand on Aziraphale’s cheek; another at Crowley’s waist, and six thousand years of distance removed in a matter of seconds, with a kiss.

Aziraphale pulls away a second later, intending it to be the first of a thousand, a million, more. Eternity. He has a moment to inhale, pulling salt-air into his lungs, not clogged with ash, nor unspoken truths, nor obnoxious false-joy, just air, sea air, and the promise of more tomorrow.

A second later, he is pulled back in, a more insistent kiss, deeper, urgent, pressing, hot where the last had been warm, darker where the first had been pure light, but this is good too, this is perfect, two halves of a whole. Didn’t some believe the Earth had once been two planets in orbit, finally colliding to make a better, firmer whole, with a moon pulling the tides, and an iron core to keep her steady?

“I love you,” he manages, unnecessarily, around Crowley’s mouth. Unnecessary because it has already been said, a hundred times or more between them, because what they share can be described in as many ways as love itself can be described, and none of it fully captures this.

Several – ten, twenty, more? – kisses later, and they are walking hand in hand back toward the village, and their belated dinner reservation. The conversation flows freely, the silence banished back from whence it came, and although Aziraphale fully intends to sleep tonight beside his love – his admitted love, his confirmed love, his confessed love – he knows they could talk until daybreak, and never run out of things to say.

Their hands remain clasped over the white tablecloth, and on the walk home, and all the way upstairs into the bedroom, where words are no longer necessary. (They do not let go for another fourteen hours; even in a rare hour of unnecessary but pleasant sleep, sated and content, they are entwined.)

As silver-grey sunlight peeks in through that expansive window, creeping around white curtains, illuminating the room, Aziraphale shifts in Crowley’s arms.

The world may have re-begun that Sunday morning at the end of the summer, when Adam Young reshaped the world back to its natural glory, and Aziraphale awoke in Crowley’s skin, braced for reprisal. But Aziraphale feels it really begins here, with his lungs clean and clear, words and shock and exhaustion unclogged from his throat, a new life beginning at every juncture where his skin meets Crowley’s. They have had six thousand years learning the world apart: it will take at least another six thousand to relearn it, together. That will do for a start, Aziraphale is sure, and then perhaps they can move on to the other planets.

Crowley breathes out slowly, and his eyes flicker open, a lazy smile smoothing across his face.

Aziraphale reaches up, and traces the planes of Crowley’s face with gentle fingers, and murmurs “Good morning.”

**Author's Note:**

> yell at me on tumblr! @rufeepeach


End file.
